Beautiful People Are Boring [STUDY]

As scientists find that attractive people tend to be conformist,
you have to agree that ugly has more fun.

Beauty is boring. And the evidence is piling up. An article in
the journal Psychological Science now confirms what partygoers
have known forever: that beauty and charm are no more directly
linked than a high IQ and a talent for whistling.

A group of scientists set out to discover whether physically
attractive people also have appealing character traits and
values, and found, according to Lihi Segal-Caspi, who carried out
part of the research, that “beautiful people tend to focus more
on conformity and self-promotion than independence and
tolerance”.

Certainly, while a room full of beautiful people might be
impressively stiff with the whiff of Chanel No 5, the
intellectual atmosphere will be carrying a very low charge. If
positive at all.

The grizzled and gargoyle-like Parisian chanteur, and legendary
lover, Serge Gainsbourg always used to pick up the ugliest girls
at parties. This was not simply because predatory male folklore
insists that ill-favoured women will be more “grateful”, but
because Gainsbourg, a stylish contrarian, knew that the
conversation would be better, the uglier the girl.

Beauty is a conformist conspiracy. And the conspirators include
the fashion, cosmetics and movie businesses: a terrible Greek
chorus of brainless idolatry towards abstract form. The
conspirators insist that women – and, nowadays, men, too – should
be un-creased, smooth, fat-free, tanned and, with the exception
of the skull, hairless. Flawlessly dull. Even Hollywood once
acknowledged the weakness of this proposition: Marilyn Monroe was
made more attractive still by the addition of a “beauty spot”, a
blemish turned into an asset.

The red carpet version of beauty is a feeble, temporary
construction. Bodies corrode and erode, sag and bulge, just as
cars rust and buildings develop a fine patina over time. This is
not to be feared, rather to be understood and enjoyed. Anyone
wishing to arrest these processes with the aid of surgery,
aerosols, paint, glue, drugs, tape and Lycra must be both very
stupid and very vain. Hence the problems encountered in
conversation with beautiful people: stupidity and vanity rarely
contribute much to wit and creativity.

Fine features may be all very well, but the great tragedy of
beauty is that it is so ephemeral. Albert Camus said it “drives
us to despair, offering for a minute the glimpse of an eternity
that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time”. And
Gainsbourg agreed when he said: “Ugliness is superior to beauty
because it lasts longer.” A hegemony of beautiful perfection
would be intolerable: we need a good measure of ugliness to keep
our senses keen. If everything were beautiful, nothing would be.

And yet, despite the evidence against, there has been a
conviction that beauty and goodness are somehow inextricably and
permanently linked. Political propaganda exploited our primitive
fear of ugliness, so we had Second World War American posters of
Japanese looking like vampire bats. The Greeks believed that
beauty had a moral character: beautiful people – discus-throwers
and so on – were necessarily good people. Darwin explained our
need for “beauty” in saying that breeding attractive children is
a survival characteristic: I may feel the need to fuse my premium
genetic material with yours, so that humanity continues in the
same fine style.

This became a lazy consensus, described as the “beauty premium”
by US economists Markus M Mobius and Tanya S Rosenblat. The
“beauty premium” insists that as attractive children grow into
attractive adults, they may find it easier to develop agreeable
interpersonal communications skills because their audience reacts
more favourably to them. In this beauty-related employment
theory, short people are less likely to get a good job. As Randy
Newman sang: “Short people got no reason to live.” So Darwin’s
argument that evolutionary forces favour a certain physical type
may be proven in the job market as well as the wider world.

But as soon as you try to grasp the concept of beauty, it
disappears. Our convictions about ugliness and beauty are the
wrong way around. Beauty is characterless uniformity, while
ugliness is fascinating, full of variety and a stimulating
challenge. Maybe John Keats was wrong and it’s a thing of
ugliness that’s a joy forever. For his part, Proust thought a
taste for the ugly was aristocratic, since it suggested a noble
reluctance to be merely pleasing.

Besides, definitions of the beautiful continuously change,
mocking yet more thoroughly the victims of this conspiracy. The
history of taste shows there are no fixed standards over time.
The approved and the disapproved come and go. Thus Rubens’s
roseate lard barrels in the 17th century, Kate Moss’s scrawny
skeleton in ours.

Slaves to beauty are slaves to a passing moment. Kate Moss,
listen to me. In 25 years, you will look ridiculous. Beautiful
people can become ugly customers. And they will likely be more
interesting for it.